[Rd] Adding Tk extensions to R for windows

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:42:34 +0100, "Marsland, John"
<John.Marsland at CommerzbankIB.com> wrote :

>My understanding is that MSYS was designed to provide a Minimal SYStem to
>complement the Minimal GNU tools. So you can run the ./configure on windows
>just the same as any unix variant and make as normal. I understand it uses
>native libraries rather then the cygwin.dll .. so should be faster??? 

Just to clarify:  currently R doesn't use cygwin.dll, just some of the
tools in the toolset for building R do.  So I doubt if there would be
a big speedup if any, but it might simplify things. You can currently
run ./configure on Windows, it just doesn't produce a configuration
that works :-(.  Fixing this is one of my projects for the next
release.

>This would completely remove the need for separate windows project (except
>for any platform specific devices eg graphics, GUIs etc ... MSYS provides
>extensions for the win32 API also) - in exactly the same way and the new Mac
>osX/fink build works. 

Essentially the main current need for separate windows code is the
device support and the GUI. There is a bit more than that (e.g.
separate makefiles), which are basically remnants of the days when the
toolset was less capable.  There are also some things which can be
handled by #ifdef's in the standard code (e.g. loading dynamic
libraries).

I will take a look at Msys after the 1.8.0 release.

Duncan Murdoch